About the role
from listingAt Lilly, the work is demanding because patients are waiting. We unite caring with discovery to help make life better for people around the world, knowing that every decision, every detail, and every day matters. Headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, our over 50,000 employees around the globe take on complex challenges to discover and deliver life-changing medicines, strengthen how health is understood and managed, and support the communities we serve.
This is hard, urgent, selfless work—but it’s work worth doing. If you’re driven by purpose and ready to bring your best to work that truly matters for patients, we invite you to join us.
Technology continues to transform every aspect of society, including healthcare. Lilly envisions digital capabilities as an extension of our medicines, not just a marketing tactic. We, as consumers, have come to expect digital experiences to augment and support our experiences with medicines — especially to help reduce the burden of coping and managing through chronic disease for us, our loved ones, and health care providers.
Hence, Lilly's Software Product Engineering team is committed to exploring how next-generation therapeutic ecosystems, connected solutions, and data analytics can transform the customer (patients, health care providers, and payers) experience, demonstrate value, and most importantly — improve patient outcomes.
The SPE Technical Lead & Engineering Manager will be responsible for developing and leading technical solutions supporting one or more Digital Health platforms. You will need to engage multiple teams to define technical requirements, develop designs, and align technology that enables the platform architecture all while meeting medical device regulatory expectations. Additionally, the organization will look to you to be a leader across SPE projects influencing other tech leads in how we develop platform solutions following best practices and driving our platform innovation roadmap.
What You'll Be Doing:
Architecture & Technical Direction
Own and approve system architecture and design decisions across your platform area.
Lead technical design reviews and ensure consistent, scalable, and resilient implementation.
Partner with product and design teams to architect maintainable solutions and evaluate UX feasibility.
Collaborate with other technical teams on the design of dependencies and shared services.
Provide technical evaluation of proposed ideas, software changes, and future releases.
Align SPE technical solutions with Lilly-supported technologies.
People Leadership & Team Management
Directly manage a team of 2–5 engineers.
Own performance management, coaching, career development
Set team priorities, manage capacity and workload, and remove obstacles to delivery.
Foster team health, engagement, and a high-performing engineering culture in a geographically separate location.
Partner with the Delivery Manager on staffing, planning, and delivery commitments.
Planning, Strategy & Innovation
Drive the development and execution of the platform innovation roadmap, including working proof-of-concept models in new technology spaces.
Provide input on future features and strategy across a 6–12 month horizon.
Lead cutover planning and ensure system dependencies are well understood and delivered appropriately.
Identify and scope spike work; recommend new technologies and tools.
Support and drive transformation initiatives.
Champion the responsible adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices — including AI-augmented development tooling — to accelerate delivery, raise code quality, and expand team capacity.
Security, Quality & Standards
Enable technical delivery of SPE software components, including understanding and addressing risk, privacy, cybersecurity, and legal constraints.
Support cybersecurity architecture evaluations.
Develop and drive adoption of platform development standards and architecture patterns across the organization.
Maintain technical documentation, including system design artifacts, security plans, and SOPs.
Document open-source standards in the Quality Management System and enforce SPE engineering standards.
Apply knowledge of medical device delivery models and quality systems to ensure solutions align with regulatory expectations and timelines.
Collaboration, Mentorship & Influence
Influence tech leads across SPE on how we develop platform solutions following best practices.
Mentor team members and participate actively in guilds and learning forums.
Facilitate knowledge transfer to operations and ensure their involvement in technical planning.
Build effective relationships with key technical resources and architects to influence SPE technology solutions.
Engage business stakeholders to understand requirements and align technical solutions.
Provide guidance to Lilly and non-Lilly software delivery teams in best-practice Agile delivery.
Apply knowledge of Lilly business processes and technology to keep deliveries consistent with strategy and roadmap.
Your Basic Requirements:
Bachelor's Degree in computer science, engineering, or a related technical field.
8+ years of experience delivering software solutions across the full development lifecycle (design, development, testing, deployment, and support).
5+ years of technical leadership experience in delivery of software projects.
3+ years of direct people-management experience leading engineers.
What You Should Bring:
Demonstrated success managing and developing a small engineering team, including performance and career conversations.
Ability to manage and keep control of multiple software development and integration efforts.
Demonstrable examples of leading software design and architecture.
Demonstrated ability to propose new ideas and influence peers.
Proven initiative to learn new technologies and seek opportunities to apply them.
Practical knowledge of Agile software development concepts and implementations.
Experience with architected asynchronous systems, using tools like Kafka or similar.
Experience with AWS, Azure, and other cloud service providers.
Experience with identity management or authentication providers (preferably Okta).
Experience with GitHub.
Experience with CI/CD capabilities and industry best practices.
Experience using Atlassian (Jira/Confluence) or similar toolsets.
High level of intellectual curiosity, external perspective, and innovation interest.
Additional Information
Role is located in San Francisco, CA with a hybrid work model — relocation required.
Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form ( https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation ) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.
Lilly is proud to be an EEO Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, ancestry, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.
Our employee resource groups (ERGs) offer strong support networks for their members and are open to all employees. Our current groups include: Africa, Middle East, Central Asia (AMECA), Black Employees at Lilly (BE@Lilly), Chinese Culture Network (CCN), EnAble, Evolve, Lilly Indian Network (LIN), Organization of Latinx at Lilly (OLA), Pride (LGBTQ+ Allies), Veterans Leadership Network (VLN) and Women’s Initiative for Leading at Lilly (WILL).
Actual compensation will depend on a candidate’s education, experience, skills, and geographic location. The anticipated wage for this position is
$138,000 - $246,400
Full-time equivalent employees also will be eligible for a company bonus (depending, in part, on company and individual performance). In addition, Lilly offers a comprehensive benefit program to eligible employees, including eligibility to participate in a company-sponsored 401(k); pension; vacation benefits; eligibility for medical, dental, vision and prescription drug benefits; flexible benefits (e.g., healthcare and/or dependent day care flexible spending accounts); life insurance and death benefits; certain time off and leave of absence benefits; and well-being benefits (e.g., employee assistance program, fitness benefits, and employee clubs and activities).
Lilly reserves the right to amend, modify, or terminate its compensation and benefit programs in its sole discretion and Lilly’s compensation practices and guidelines will apply regarding the details of any promotion or transfer of Lilly employees.
#WeAreLilly